From Walker Mimms
NEW YORK: “We had to start from scratch.” “We wanted to start from scratch again.” “It was not an intellectual approach, but rather an anarchic one: just start from scratch again.” These statements by saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, composer Irmin Schmidt and guitarist Lutz Ludwig Kramer from the newly translated oral history “Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock” explain the high stakes that drove German counterculture in the decades after World War II.
After the unthinkable, German youth inherited a “country in ruins and with it a destroyed culture” (says Schmidt), a division between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, a worldwide fear of everything German, an identity crisis and the question: How should one react to the crimes of one’s parents?
All of this is easy to forget when listening to the joyful and life-affirming music that this generation produced in the 1970s. Kraftwerk, Can, Popol Vuh and their peers—a diverse movement often pejoratively referred to as Krautrock—raised the bar for electronic experimentation and collaborative democracy in pop music, and prepared the ground for punk, industrial and techno. But oral histories are compelling through mutual testimony, and many of the 66 actors and observers Christoph Dallach interviewed for this book achieved their “Neuer Klang” by fleeing Germany’s authoritarian past. A translation of “Neu Klang” by Katy Derbyshire, first published in German in 2021, shows English-speaking listeners a generation of musicians struggling through the legacy of fascism.
“When I started school, we had to say ‘Heil Hitler’ for two days – and suddenly it became ‘Good morning’,” says pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. For drummer and electronic music pioneer Harald Grosskopf, whose father was a Nazi officer, “my fight with him became the greatest conflict of my life” and “was probably the reason why I ended up playing Krautrock.”
Despite German denazification initiatives in 1945, Schmidt, keyboardist and founder of the influential band Can, was expelled from school for outing former Nazis at his school. And Holger Czukay, a Can founder who played bass, said: “I never really knew my father; he was definitely a Nazi.” Jaki Liebezeit, the band’s drummer, explains the formative instinct: “What we did with Can back then had a lot to do with coming to terms with that past.”
In Dallach’s retelling, Can seems like the textbook example of German collaboration. (The two founders of the utopian electronic group Kraftwerk, the movement’s best-known band, are not interviewed in the book.) “Any form of dictatorship horrified me,” says Schmidt. Although Can was not a commune like the invigorating and sinister band Amon Duul II, they shared decision-making and all songwriting credit, even for the improvised linguistic leaps of their Japanese singer Damo Suzuki.
Can recorded many hours of groove-based improvisation and then spliced the best bits together on tape. This technique was made possible by the astonishingly precise funk drumming of Liebezeit, who kept the beat like a deck of cards in slow motion. On his cult albums and live bootlegs, no one seems to play a solo. Everyone plays the same.
This was a far cry from the German music scene of the 1960s, which is discussed here in the context of the country’s underdog status. “Schlager was so popular,” says guitarist Günter Schickert about the ubiquitous brand of music songs, because after the war “there was no other German music left.”
As for classical music, “music lessons felt like a Nazi trying to force me to do things,” recalls Michael Hoenig, a one-time member of the group Tangerine Dream, which rivaled Pink Floyd in terms of immersive synthesizer soundscapes. Schmidt, who initially trained as a conductor and composer under Karlheinz Stockhausen, abandoned his education for “a fresh start” that would “reclaim our own history.”
